If you’ve ever wondered why the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, it’s because it’s a pangram used to test typewriters and computer keyboards.

Pangrams are short, coherent lines of text containing all the letters of the English alphabet. Compare the above to typing abcdefg… and so on, you’ll find using the pangram much easier. I grabbed a few more from around the net in case you’re bored of hearing about the fox.

• The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
• Playing jazz vibe chords quickly excites my wife.
• Jinxed wizards pluck ivy from the big quilt.
• Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
• Jim just quit and packed extra bags for Liz Owen.
• Six crazy kings vowed to abolish my quite pitiful jousts.

Now it all makes sense.

Do you know any other interesting pangrams?

Monetizing your blog can be a little tricky. Most themes are designed around content and navigation rather than advertisements and with Googles fixed dimension Adsense ads things don’t always go together perfectly.

If your looking to monetize your Wordpress blog, here are 10 Adsense ready wordpress themes to get you started. There are a variety of ad placement locations depending on your style, everything from 125×125 pixels boxes to 728×90 pixel leaderboards.

DarkZen comes with a dark header and a gray background, packed on a clean and minimalist design.

Connections by Vanilla Mist.

BlueSensation is a clean theme with a traditional look: large content column on the left and a single sidebar, ready to display 125×125 ads.

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I recently began a job for a client to design a brochure for their patient care service, the project is small budget and to be printed in CMYK only. Everything was going fine then someone said it, brown text.

While extremely accurate, printers are not 100% perfect. There is inevitably a tiny amount of misregistration between the 4 layers of ink.

In this case, mixing the 4 colours to create brown, if you imagine the layers of cyan, magenta and yellow being slightly off centre from the black, they create coloured halos around the text as pictured above.

When printing headings or large text this isn’t a problem, but applying this to a body of 10pt type is likely to create quite a mess.

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A little watery web inspiration for us all. I would think water is a fairly uncommon theme on the internet, take a look at these 5 great sites, perhaps you’ll use a watery theme for your next web project?

Thanks to Ek & Gren, Design Disease, Get Me Fast, Tomas Pojeta and
Quinns Reef Bed & Breakfast for their inspiring websites.

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As any web designer will tell you, Internet Explorer, especially version 6, is the bane of our existence (you can actually buy “i hate IE 6″ tee-shirts now). Unfortunately for us, around 60% of web users are using Internet Explorer as their default browser and around 15% are still on IE6.

If you’ve played with web design to any extent you’ve no doubt experienced some of Internet Explorers renowned problems for yourself, such as;

• It rarely displays CSS code as it should and throws in extra margins/padding/line-height wherever it feels like
• IE nearly always requires a second style sheet to be created full of crude hacks to overcome the above listed problems
• No PNG support, turns all your transparencies into 50% grey
• It can still somehow fail to correctly display sites that adhere to WC3 standards
• Fails to display unordered list blocks in 10 different ways
• And the point of this article, of the 10 different unordered list errors there’s 20 different solutions, and the correct one is never the same for 2 people

After creating my new wordpress theme for this site, i had the even stranger problem that in IE6 the blocks in my right column displayed correctly, while the left column blocks where showing as around 3 times the height even though they were using the same rules. Obviously this totally ruined the look of the site.

The solution to the problem varies depending on exactly how your unordered lists are set up.

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